"Floral Decorations for Bananas" is a poem from Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

's first book of poetry, Harmonium

Harmonium (poetry collection)

Harmonium is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. His first book, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. He was in middle age at that time, forty-four years old. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred...

(1923). It was first published Measure 26 (Apr. 1923) and is therefore under copyright, however it is quoted here as justified by fair use

Fair use

Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...

 in order to facilitate scholarly commentary.

The poem's speaker is unhappy about the choice of bananas as a table decoration, complaining that they don't match well with the eglantine and are suitable only for a room of women who are all shanks and bangles and slatted eyes. Recommended instead are plums in an eighteen-century dish, centering a room in which there would be women of primrose and purl.

Floral Decorations for Bananas  Well, nuncle, this plainly won't do.  These insolent, linear peels  And sullen, hurricane shapes  Won't do with your eglantine.  They require something serpentine.  Blunt yellow in such a room!  You should have had plums tonight,  In an eighteenth-century dish,  And pettifogging buds,  For the women of primrose and purl  Each one in her decent curl.  Good God! What a precious light!  But bananas hacked and hunched....  The table was set by an ogre,  His eye on an outdoor gloom  And a stiff and noxious place.  Pile the bananas on planks.  The women will be all shanks  And bangles and slatted eyes.  And deck the bananas in leaves  Plucked from the Carib trees  Fibrous and dangling down,  Oozing cantankerous gum  Out of their purple maws,  Darting out of their purple craws  Their musky and tingling tongues.

This poem finds Stevens, the cool master

Harmonium (poetry collection)

Harmonium is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. His first book, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. He was in middle age at that time, forty-four years old. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred...

 as Yvor Winters

Yvor Winters

Arthur Yvor Winters was an American poet and literary critic.-As modernist:Winters's early poetry, which appeared in small avant-garde magazines alongside work by writers like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, was written in the modernist idiom, and was heavily influenced both by Native American...

 described him, in warm good humor, putting the world's raw material in tension with imagination's desire for a sophisticated construct. The raw bananas don't quite succumb, and there is a suggestion that this is not a bad thing, if only to provide energy and impetus for imagination's renewal. Alternatively, the poem can be interpreted as about the dangers of blatant sexuality and Stevens's "fear of the force of female sexuality".http://www.english.uiuc.edu/Maps/poets/s_z/stevens/bananas.htm

Surely Marianne Moore had this poem foremost in mind when she compared Stevens's efforts in Harmonium to Henri Rousseau

Henri Rousseau

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier , a humorous description of his occupation as a toll collector...

's paintings.http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6d/Rousseau_theRepastOfTheLion.jpg There is lushness and sexuality in both.

The poetic device that Robert Buttel noted in connection with "The Apostrophe to Vincentine

The Apostrophe to Vincentine

"The Apostrophe to Vincentine " is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium . It was first published before 1923 and is therefore in the public domain according to Librivox....

 is at work here too, in what Eleanor Cook, following art historian Ernst Gombrich

Ernst Gombrich

Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE was an Austrian-born art historian who became naturalized British citizen in 1947. He spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom...

, calls inverted recognition, "the recognition not of reality in a painting but of a painting in reality".http://www.english.uiuc.edu/Maps/poets/s_z/stevens/bananas.htm